American architect, the longest and most prolifically individual career in American architecture and the author of an articulated (if idiosyncratic) social program for the relation of building, land, and community that stood as the principal American alternative to the European modernism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Over a seventy-year career he designed more than 1,100 structures, of which roughly half were built; the American Institute of Architects in 1991 named him "the greatest American architect of all time."
Wright grew up in Wisconsin in a Unitarian family shaped by the principles of his uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones; trained in the Chicago office of Louis Sullivan; and left in 1893 to found his own practice. The early "Prairie style" houses — Robie House in Chicago (1910), the Willits House in Highland Park (1901), Wingspread in Wisconsin (1937) — articulated a distinctive American domestic architecture of low horizontal lines, overhanging eaves, open interior plans, and intimate relation to the prairie landscape. The Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo (1904, demolished) and Unity Temple in Oak Park (1908) extended the vocabulary to commercial and religious buildings. A middle career of personal scandal and professional obscurity gave way to the extraordinary late burst that produced his most internationally recognized works: Fallingwater over the waterfall at Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1935); the Johnson Wax Headquarters at Racine (1936); Taliesin West at Scottsdale (1937 onward); the Guggenheim Museum in New York (completed 1959, six months after his death).
Wright's social program — most fully stated in The Disappearing City (1932) and the Broadacre City model he promoted for decades thereafter — argued for a decentralized, agrarian-technological American landscape in which every family would have an acre, electric power and the automobile would distribute the city across the country, and architecture would re-ground American life in its own soil rather than in borrowed European urban forms. As urban theory it is eccentric and frankly anti-urban — Jacobs's Death and Life is a considered refutation, and the vision has some affinity with the suburbanization that actually occurred, though Wright disavowed that affinity — but as a statement of the American agrarian-democratic tradition in architectural form it has no real competitor.
The single best-known concept in the Wrightian vocabulary is organic architecture — the principle that a building should grow from its site as a plant grows from the soil, in its materials, its proportions, and its relation to landscape. Fallingwater is the iconic instance. The difficulty is that the principle is not fully specifiable and that its application depends substantially on Wright himself.
Wright is on the graph as the American alternative to the European modernism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Broadacre City and the Prairie houses articulate a distinct program — decentralized, agrarian-technological, site-rooted — that no American architect before or since has stated as fully.